How to Find a Mentor

Most of you are going about the whole networking thing completely wrong.

You send cold DMs to people hoping to get mentorship.

You interact without adding real value.

You reach out to people who are WAYYY ahead of you.

All mistakes that are easily avoidable. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve heard me say all that before.

However, there is a bigger networking lesson I’ve only recently become aware of…

Meeting people in real life changes everything.

As much as I love the internet, shaking someone’s hand and looking them in the eye changes the dynamic of the relationship.

In the past month, I’ve met a bunch of great people on my travels.

Some of them you know from Twitter (Shoutout to Troy Francis, let’s get him to 5k followers), others you have never heard of because they work behind the scenes.

And that there really is the key: The people you see online are only a small subset of online businessmen.

In fact, most of the people you probably reach out to and interact with probably teach marketing or making money online in one form or another.</>

And that’s a bit of a problem.

Here’s why…

I get messages every day from people wanting help. I don’t know most of them and rarely does anyone catch my attention enough to really earn my time.

From time to time, I get fantastic outreach emails or DMs. (You know who you are.)

Those become potential partnerships in the future.

But those messages are rare.

I get at least 10 generic, shitty messages for every good one…

“Please help me bro”
“How do I learn copywrite?”
“How do I make money?”

Yeah, that bad.

Every day.

I’m not complaining. It is what it is.

The reason I’m writing all this is to prove a point: People who create content about making money online get a lot of shitty questions every single day.

The result?

Many experts stop responding to their emails.

That means you can’t get their attention once they reach a certain size of audience.

But there is an answer if you’re looking to get help or “mentorship” (I hate that word) from successful online businessmen…

Go offline.

Meet people in the real world.

Not only will you have more of a bond with the expert if you meet him face to face, but you’ll also start meeting guys who work behind the scenes.

Those guys often make just as much (if not more) more than those of us with a personal brand.

You can learn a ton from them and the best part is, they aren’t getting flooded with shitty questions day and night.

Nobody asks them for help.

Nobody cares about their opinion for the most part.

That is an opportunity for you. If you can find 1-2 smart guys who aren’t public figures, you can often pick their brains and they’ll love it.

The tricky part, of course, is finding these people. For that, we’re going to go back online…

I’m not going to lie: I had a nice head-start on that front because I know people online who were able to connect me with their friends.

And from what I’ve seen, that’s largely how you establish a network: You meet someone, show that you’re cool and provide value somehow and then they’ll introduce you to their friends.

I started my travels with 3 contacts to meet up with. One guy I was connected to through a mutual friend (Thank you Kyle). The other I found on a travel/business forum.

By the end of the month, I’d met and connected with 8 different smart men who are all doing their own thing and making money.

And with the exception of Troy, none of them have a personal brand.

These are all behind-the-scenes guys. All happy to help a young guy who has intelligent questions.

I know getting that first offline connection can be tough.

And unfortunately, I don’t really have any concrete advice for how to go about it.

But hopefully, simply telling you where to look will help you find like-minded individuals who you connect with.

That’s all for today.

See you tomorrow,
James Holt